Best practices on lead generation

Lead Liaison

The Benefits of IP Address Tracking

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The Benefits of IP Address TrackingIP address tracking is a handy thing to have on your website. Once you have a user’s IP, you can begin the process of tying the visit to more personal information about the user. Knowing how individual users behave on your website can influence your advertising campaigns from top to bottom in a way that ultimately benefits your bottom line.

IP Address Tracking and Analytics Software

Here’s the rub – much of the analytics software people are using these days doesn’t rack IPs. In fact, dashboards like Google Analytics actually forbid IP tracking in their terms of service. They seem to want you to have as little information about your customers as possible.

Sure, privacy is important, but the amount of information you collect from an IP address is limited. For instance, you can’t use an IP to find out exactly where a user’s personal/home address might be.  However, sometimes an ISP links back to a user’s place of work. Knowing how much a person from another company is viewing your website, and how long they spend there, can give you intelligence information you can apply to your sales campaigns.

Using IP Information In Your Advertising

It’s more than likely that based on your call volume and call details, you can match up IP visitors with specific people who have filled out your forms or inquired about your services.  If a user takes a specific action on your site at the same time you’re logging an IP, you can match users with IPs. You can then track that IP throughout visits to get an idea of how a user is exploring specific pages on your site as well as how much time they’re spending.

If you have multiple visitors on your site at any given time, you might need to watch for further visits or take a look at the geographic source of IPs to get your information. It’s a good idea to work with your marketing and tech departments to ensure both are using this information to your best advantage.

Lead Liaison is proud to offer real-time IP and visitor tracking solutions for your business. With our streamer feature, you can watch visitors real-time as they use your site and determine how to have your sales people talking to them in a way that will make a sale. We’d love to talk to you about Streamer and our other tracking features – let us show you how IP tracking can benefit your business today!

Lead Liaison

How to Successfully Generate B2B Leads Using Twitter

/0 Comments/in , , /by

How to Successfully Generate B2B Leads Using TwitterWe were talking about lead generation at lunch the other day. The subject of Twitter use for B2B lead gen came up. We started sharing stories of customers’ Twitter experiences when it occurred to us that some marketers are not using Twitter effectively because of a their approach to leveraging the channel properly among other marketing assets.

Those of you deploying marketing automation for lead generation practices understand that Twitter can be embedded easily within a campaign without consuming a lot of time and energy. In fact, Twitter works great as a lead generator when tweets are folded into an automated campaign. The following four steps can lead you to B2B lead generation success through Twitter using a marketing automation platform in our article on how to successfully generate B2B leads using Twitter.

1) Provide a survey

Survey your Twitter followers with a brief, five-question survey to uncover a common unfulfilled need or desire. Tweet out the link to a landing page with a short explanation. The follower should land on a squeeze page with a web form (created in your MA platform!) including email address with 1 or 2 qualifying questions. Below the form, the survey should be clear to understand and easy to complete. (P.S. Offer a bonus for completing the survey.)

2) Send a thank you email

Distribute an email thanking followers for their participation in the survey. In the message, tell them that a solution will be tweeted in the near future and ask/encourage them to share the upcoming announcement with their followers.

3) Announce a solution

Once you’ve determined you can provide a solution to respondents’ needs or desires, tweet out an announcement about the solution with a link to a video, product page, or other asset where interested followers can learn more. Link tracking will reveal behavior that can escalate a follower further into the marketing funnel.

4) Send an autoresponse email to click-through followers

Express thanks for learning more, offer additional value by providing more information, and provide a link to a tweet announcing a promotional offer that can be found on a dedicated landing page. (If the promo tweet is retweeted or shared, extend an additional offer to those followers who act as a brand ambassador.

At this point the leads generated through this process are beyond top-of-funnel and can be entered into a nurturing program. There are many other ways Twitter can be used to successfully generate leads. Stay on top of Lead Liaison’s revenue generation blog for more social media and marketing automation ideas.

Lead Liaison

Why Your New Web Design May Need Landing Page Testing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Why Your New Web Design May Need Landing Page TestingMany new website owners shudder at the thought of doing landing page testing – particularly when a website has just been redesigned or newly launched. A few months after a new website is live, many site owners are sitting back and enjoying a few web-hassle-free months. Unfortunately, it might be in a business owner’s best interest to jump right back on the web accessibility horse, even when a new site or redesign is only a few months old.

Landing Page Testing: We’re Sorry

Because landing page testing often seems unnecessary or too complicated, many business owners gloss over it and continue worrying about lead gen strategies. For many businesses, this can be a bad move – particularly when the website serves as a primary storefront for the brand.

It’s a smart idea to not only set a newly designed website up with Google Analytics or comparable marketing automation tools, but to begin immediately making observations about traffic data. Some questions business owners should be asking include:

  1. Were visitors more interactive with our old site?
  2. Is our bounce rate increasing?
  3. Are users taking the new conversion actions we’ve set up on the site?
  4. Do users find the navigation helpful?
  5. What, if anything, should we include in future plans to make the website easier to use?

The answers to these questions will often determine whether a business owner should begin planning landing page testing right away.

How Landing Page Testing Can Make the Difference

Many business owners assume that building a new website will automatically yield better navigation, a more pleasing look and therefore higher conversion rates. Many new websites don’t split-test an older look against a new look, so it’s difficult to get an idea of how user-friendly visitors find a new website compared to an older version.

In a perfect world, business owners would make former elements of a website such as buy buttons, forms and login links as easy to find on a new website, but it doesn’t always work that way. The ability to set up testing before a website would be great, but not all business owners will do this. One alternative is to create a landing page that looks like the previous design of the site. This page could serve as a gateway to the new design. Business owners could execute landing page testing to gauge the effectiveness of the new page compared with simply sending visitors to the new site.

Marketing automation can give business owners a deeper insight into how landing page testing and new designs affect lead generation. Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking capabilities go much deeper than Google Analytics or heat maps. To find out more, visit www.leadliaison.com.

Lead Liaison

B2B Content Marketing Trends in 2013

/0 Comments/in , /by

B2B Content Marketing Trends in 2013LinkedIn released the results from a 2013 content marketing trends survey of its B2B Technology Marketing Community. The overall impression from the survey? The popularity of content marketing is increasing; however, the tactics are changing. We’ll look at B2B content marketing trends in 2013.

Here are some key findings from the survey:

  1. 61% of marketers use marketing automation platforms, up from 43% last year
  2. 93% of B2B marketers are creating their own content while 34% are syndicating or curating content and 30% are encouraging user-generated content
  3. YouTube popularity as a channel to engage B2B audiences is rising while Facebook is losing ground; videos are the fifth most effective content format to reach B2B audiences and 73% indicated that YouTube is an effective platform, up from 53% in 2012
  4. The least popular content formats are printed books, online games, and podcasts
  5. Whitepapers dropped significantly in perceived effectiveness, moving from second place in 2012 to sixth place in 2013
  6. Customer testimonials and case studies are considered the most effective B2B content tactics
  7. The top three marketing goals for content marketing are lead generation (71%), thought leadership/market education (50%), and customer acquisition (45%)
  8. LinkedIn is considered an effective social media network for reaching and engaging B2B audiences by 85% of respondents
  9. 65% indicated that Twitter is an effective channel; this was down from 70% last year
  10.  39% indicated Facebook remains an effective platform, down from 54% in 2012
  11. 37% of marketers use marketing automation to generate leads while 36% use an MA platform to nurture leads
  12. 39% don’t use marketing automation in any capacity, down from 57% last year
  13. 55% say the top challenge for their enterprise is to find enough time and bandwidth to create content; the next biggest challenges are producing engaging content (49%) and producing enough content variety to fulfill the needs of marketing programs (39%)

The survey was conducted in June 2013 and included 815 LinkedIn community members from a wide range of industries, locations, and employers.

Lead Liaison

Are Your Landing Pages Ruining Your Business?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Are Your Landing Pages Ruining Your Business?Conversion optimization is the key to continually improving landing pages. Your landing pages have only one purpose – driving sales. Regardless of whether your landers collect email information, pop up a chat box, inform people about your services or simply brand your product – or all of these things – landing pages are there to sell you and what you have to offer. For some small businesses, landing pages are so poorly optimized that a potential sale is dead in the water less than 30 seconds after a new customer hits landing pages.

Conversion Optimization and Landing Pages

One of the biggest problems with conversion-optimized landing pages – and web design in general – is that the design expectations of the business owner don’t fit what customers need to see. Many business owners don’t make an aesthetic distinction between what their personal website and business website should look like. The result is two-fold:

  1. The landing page doesn’t meet the needs of the consumer. Meaning the look, general appeal or feel of the site are a turn-off to the user. This can happen when the business owner goes for a site that matches their own preferences and aesthetic rather than meeting the needs of his/her target audience.
  2. The landing page doesn’t meet the customer’s needs for conversion optimization. This can mean several things, including lack of a clear path to leave an email, no contact information for the business, sales copy that isn’t compelling or missing listings of key product features.

Don’t Just Use Your Imagination

When it comes to conversion optimization, let the data speak for you. Google Analytics is one way to get an idea of how users are moving through your website. Marketing automation like Lead Liaison can give you a fuller picture by identifying web actions with a particular user or company. This sort of deep analysis and business intelligence can help you ensure your conversion optimization is timely, cost-effective and enhances your website.

Business owners should also remember that multiple pages on a site have multi-functional purposes. Running an Adwords campaign that sends people to a business index page isn’t always the best way to go – for starters, index pages often aren’t keyword or service themed and using a .com index page as an Adwords destination URL can decrease your quality score. This can drive up the costs of your advertising and CPA when using Adwords.

Instead, create multiple pages that speak to all your services, then practice good conversion optimization on those pages over time as data comes in. In this way, you can ensure your customers get what they need and your business keeps closing sales.

For more information on how a well-placed marketing automation platform can inform your conversion optimization efforts, check out Lead Liaison today!

Lead Liaison

Five Reasons why it is Necessary to Follow Leads with Website Visitor Tracking

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Five Reasons why it is Necessary to Follow Leads with Website Visitor TrackingToday’s consumers are exceptionally fickle because they know they have an endless supply of online options. If they don’t find the answers they are searching for on one website, they will quickly jump to the next. In fact, most companies that don’t use website visitor tracking software will lose 95% of the visitors who have went on their site before they have the opportunity to really connect with them.

Website visitor tracking remedies this problem.

Modern businesses need to utilize a marketing automation strategy that includes website visitor tracking software to retain every potential lead. It is the fastest and most effective way to capture and convert more leads into customers.

Five reasons why it is necessary to follow leads with website visitor tracking

1.       Captures Every Lead on Their Site

Website visitor tracking software automatically stores the IP address of every person who comes in contact with your website. It tells which link they followed to get to your site and which pages they landed on while they were on your site.

2.       Determine Their Stage in the Buying Process

Marketing automation strategists are able to use website visitor tracking to monitor the online activity of each lead. This gives them powerful insight into where the lead is at in their buying process. Certain triggers, like visiting a company’s contact page can be strong indicators that a lead is approaching the end of their buying process.

3.       Faster Responses to Interested Buyers

One great advantage to website visitor tracking is its ability to immediately notify the sales department if there is an interested buyer. If a potential lead’s characteristics and online behavior is similar to the profile of an existing client, the marketing automation software will immediately send a notification by text or email to the appropriate sales professional. This technology also makes it easier to quickly answer lead’s questions and concerns as they occur.

4.       Analyze and Identify Behavioral Patterns

Behavioral patterns will become apparent as the website visitor tracking software evaluates more and more leads. It will be easier to identify buying triggers if you consistently follow and analyze the paths of recently converted leads.

5.       Build a Comprehensive Lead Profile

Website visitor tracking makes it easier to develop a complete lead profile that covers all behavioral and demographic characteristics since it physical follows each lead throughout their buying process. This information will make it easier to connect and convert more leads.

Website visitor tracking software will capture every lead on a site, determine what stage they are at in their buying process, make it easier to quickly respond to interested buyers, identify behavioral patterns and help build a comprehensive lead profile. That is why it is so necessary to follow leads with website visitor tracking.

Lead Liaison

8 Marketing Tips for Generating More Leads and More Revenue

/0 Comments/in , , /by

8 Marketing Tips for Generating More Leads and More Revenue

Has your business reached its full potential?

How many potential leads are you missing out on daily?

How much revenue could be generated from those leads?

The internet has created a competitive, yet highly lucrative marketplace for those that know how to use it to its full potential. Smart entrepreneurs are taking advantage of automated marketing techniques that are designed to efficiently generate more leads and more revenue by engaging, profiling, and nurturing potential consumers.

Here are 8 valuable marketing tips for generating more leads and more revenue:

1.       Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It should come as no surprise that the first marketing tip is to improve your websites ranking using a comprehensive SEO strategy.  It is estimated that over 70% of people begin their buying process online and the majority of those people will only visit websites that appear on the first page of the search results. You can generate more leads and revenue through SEO by establishing authority, creating content that provides value to the reader, and using appropriate keywords in your articles and on your webpages.

2.       Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Another aspect of SEO is social media marketing. There are billions of potential leads logging into social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter daily. You will be able to generate more leads by creating engaging and exciting social profiles on these networking sites that are linked back to your website. You can then generate more revenue by reaching out to these new contacts and converting them into sales.

3.       Automated Lead Generation

It almost goes without saying that automated lead generation software is the easiest and fastest way to generate more leads. It is estimated that 95% of the people who click on a website will leave unnoticed, if the website does not have an effective system for capturing them. Automated lead generation software ensures that every visitor will be added to the company’s lead database.

4.       Website Visitor Tracking

The next valuable marketing tip is to use website visitor tracking with your automated lead generation software. This will allow you to monitor their online behavior, including which pages they click on and how long they stay on each page.

5.       Lead Profiling

The next marketing tip is to use the information that has been gathered through website visitor tracking to develop a comprehensive lead profile. It is also beneficial to include online registries and access barriers on your website to extract additional demographic information on each potential lead.

6.       Lead Qualification

After gathering information on every lead that has come across your site, the next marketing tip is to compare that profile to existing clientele to determine their likelihood for conversion. Each characteristic should be given a value based on relevancy, so leads can be scored based on how close they match up to a typical consumer. This technique has been proven to generate more revenue since every lead is immediately passed onto the sales department once they are determined to be a qualified lead.

7.       Lead Nurturing

Another benefit of lead profiling is using that information to personalize content based on different lead segments. Marketers can create helpful articles directed at groups of leads that have similar needs. For example, if your website promotes nutritional supplements and you have a group of people who have clicked on an article about strategies for long-distance runners, you could create an article about how nutritional supplements can help support long-distance runners and then send it to that specific lead segment.

8.       Complete Marketing Automation Program

Fortunately, most of these marketing tips can be accomplished using one comprehensive formula. Marketing automation software provides lead generation and website visitor tracking, as well as lead profiling, qualification, and nurturing. It follows leads through their buying process and helps to guide them in the right direction. You need SEO and SMM to direct companies onto your site, but it takes marketing automation to transform those leads into more revenue.

Lead Liaison

How to Capture and Hold onto Qualified Leads

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

How to Capture and Hold onto Qualified LeadsQualified leads are passing through your website daily. The trick is being able to capture and convert these leads into sales before they move onto the next site. Marketing automation programs begin with lead generation software that will automatically capture every potential lead that crosses paths with your site. It will hold onto qualified leads as they search online and help direct them towards relevant products or services that your company is able to offer them.

Website Visitor Tracking

Each lead that the software captures is monitored and tracked as they move along your site. Website visitor tracking will tell you which pages and articles they read, how long they spent on each page, and whether or not they are a repeat visitor. This information will make it easier to determine what they are interested in and how far along they are in their buying process.

Customized Lead Nurturing

Marketers can use the information extracted by the website visitor tracking software to cater content specifically towards their unique needs and interest. This will help you hold onto more qualified leads, since consumers who are seriously interested in a product or service will appreciate helpful and personalized emails and newsletter rather than the usual pushy sales pitches and irrelevant promotional pieces.

Lead Profile & Ranking

Marketing automation software will capture more qualified leads because it take the information gathered through website visitor tracking to generate a lead profile based on each lead’s behavioral and demographic characteristics. The software will assign a value to each attribute based on relevancy and then rank the lead based on how closely they match up to a typical consumer. This ranking system will show which leads are qualified and worth contacting directly.

Automatic Notifications to Sales Professionals

The best part of using marketing automation software to capture more qualified leads is that your sales team will be immediately notified about any qualified leads. The appropriate sales personnel will receive a text or an email instantly when the software identifies a lead that has a high potential for conversion.

If you are interested in learning more about capturing and holding onto qualified leads, please read Technically Marketing’s informative article, Driving More Qualified Leads to Sales Using Marketing Automation Techniques. I can admit that my opinion is slightly biased, since I am a marketing automation expert. On the other hand, the author at Technically Marketing who wrote this article has an appreciation for marketing automation based solely on research and professional experience.

Lead Liaison

Email Marketing and Website Traffic Information: The Big Picture

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Email Marketing and Website Traffic InformationEmail marketing is an integral part of your overall marketing strategy, and the website traffic information you can glean from email reporting gives you an idea as to your email campaign’s effectiveness. However, when your email marketing platform doesn’t integrate with your other campaigns – like Adwords, Analytics, social media or your overall website visits – you may be missing data that can give you a better strategy.

Email Marketing and Website Traffic Information

A good email marketing campaign will undoubtedly bring some traffic to your website. If your current email marketing efforts don’t incorporate a linking strategy that sends visitors back to special pages on your website, it may be time to consider a change. Good linking practices can help you get your email reader even further down your sales funnel – and that’s the point of your email marketing in general.

Once you’re getting visitors back to your website via your email marketing campaigns – or if you’re getting visitors already – it’s time to take a look at how website traffic information from your email marketing efforts reflects on your overall marketing visits. Oh wait – you’re having a difficult time doing that with your current website traffic information tracking? Like many other businesses, you may not have an accurate idea of how your email marketing efforts, your Adwords or other PPC efforts or your general marketing strategy affect your campaigns on the whole.

Marketing Automation: A Holistic Perspective

The history of your email marketing may be unclear when you look at it through tools like Google Analytics. Folks who sign up for your email list may end up exploring certain areas of your website more than users who came through other methods. You may also find that the same specific email users are clicking on your email links again and again. When it comes to website traffic information, Google Analytics and other web tracking suites aren’t going to give you the kind of specific information about your visitors that you’ll get from marketing automation services. A good marketing automation dashboard will show you not just numbers – as in, xx amount of visitors have clicked over to your website from a certain email campaign – you’ll be able to see who these clicks are, assess their specific path through your website and more.

This isn’t just a fancy tool you’ll use to watch a certain visitor – its intelligence data, the kind that can change your email marketing strategy to give your users a better experience. Better experiences become greater sales and can even shorten your overall funnel or the efforts you put into doing your marketing.

When it comes to website traffic information, Lead Liaison’s suite of tools competes with other major marketing automation tools at only a portion of the price. Learn more by visiting leadliaison.com.

Lead Liaison

The Challenges and Benefits of Automated Lead Generation

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The Challenges and Benefits of Automated Lead GenerationMore and more companies are taking advantage of automated lead generation programs since marketing automation software has now proven its worth with countless industry leaders. Savvy businesses that have implemented a comprehensive marketing automation strategy are experiencing up to a 200% increase in their conversion rate.

Unfortunately, not everyone who uses automated lead generation software will reap the same benefits. Worthwhile lead generation has been a constant struggle for traditional marketers who don’t know how to use the software to its full capabilities, as discussed in Business News Daily’s article from April 23, 2013; Lead Generation B2B Challenges. Businesses that are not aware of how to extract useful information, accurately rank leads, and effectively nurture each lead will struggle to see all the benefits of lead generation.

Lead Generation Challenges

One of the greatest challenges with lead generation is that most marketing automation software systems are underutilized. Companies that don’t utilize a lead’s behavioral and demographic characteristics for lead scoring and customized lead nurturing will not see the results they would expect. Automated lead generation needs to be combined with a full-scale marketing automation program to ensure that every lead is understood and pointed in the right direction.

Benefits of Lead Generation

The benefits of lead generation are pretty obvious; having more leads means a higher potential for sales. However, it is the benefits of automated lead generation combined with a complete marketing automation program that will truly give you a worthwhile return on your investment.

When it is accompanied by a marketing automation program, lead generation is run using automated software that guarantees no lead will be missed. Every person who crosses paths with your website will be captured, profiled, and scored. The software tracks which pages each lead visits, how long they stay on each page, as well as any demographic details that they voluntarily offer through newsletter registries or pop-up questionnaires. Creating pop-up barriers that request leads sign up before they are provided with more valuable content is one of the best practices for fully utilizing lead generation and marketing automation software.

Gain Greater Insight into Leads

Automated lead generation is focused on gathering relevant information on each lead. This will make it easier to identify qualified leads, plus it will provide crucial profiling details that can be used to create more customized lead nurturing content.

The real benefits of lead generation are only realized if the lead is converted into a customer. Automated lead generation combined with marketing automation will offer marketers and sales professionals valuable insight into each lead, so they can use a more personalized approach and increase their chances of conversion.

Although there will be some challenges when it comes to achieving the greatest benefits from automated lead generation, it is still a valuable tool even when it is not used to its full capacity. Using marketing automation software for lead generation will ensure that every lead on your site is identified. When it the program is used to its full intent, it will also gather valuable details on each lead to support lead scoring, lead profiling, and lead nurturing efforts.